The Distillation

Inside a previously unremarkable circle of grass about 10 metres in diameter, a bold new precedent for drugs policy was set in the UK. Pitched on the grass at the Secret Garden Party festival in Cambridgeshire, was a tent run by The Loop, a not for profit drug and alcohol service. For those few days it was the first ever de facto decriminalised space for possession of drugs in the UK.

Attendees of the festival could come to the tent and hand over to Loop staff a pill or small scoop of powder where it would be tested for content, purity and strength by a team of chemists without any police interference. This was not 'drug checking' to ensure safer consumption, but harm minimisation. And yes, it was legal. No drugs were returned to users and all drugs were destroyed in the testing process, with police collecting any remnants.

The phase 3 trials will assess the efficacy and safety of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in 200 to 300 participants with PTSD, 18 years of age and older, at sites in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. Participants will be randomized to receive three daylong sessions of either MDMA or placebo in conjunction with psychotherapy over a 12-week treatment period, along with 12 associated 90-minute nondrug preparatory and integration sessions. The primary endpoint will be the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale, as assessed by a blinded pool of independent raters. The first phase 3 trial will begin enrolling patients in spring 2018 after the completion of an open-label lead-in training study at phase 3 sites starting this fall.

Kevin Saunders, running for Mayor of Marina, California, has proposed a ballot measure that would decriminalize psilocybin for adults over 21-years-old. Saunders claimed the mushrooms helped him kick his heroin addiction 15 years ago. At least 365,880 verified signatures in support of the measure would need to be collected before it could appear on California’s 2018 ballot. “I think we’re seeing something that could literally heal our brothers and sisters,” Saunders said. “We’re talking about real cutting-edge stuff.”

While it is extremely encouraging that the federal government would turn a blind eye to the Controlled Substances Act and decades of failed War on Drugs propaganda to expedite the healing of a massive population of suffering Americans, why stop with the psychedelics? What, besides contributions from industries like Big Alcohol, Tobacco, and Pharma, would be stopping the FDA from affording cannabis the same chance as psilocybin and MDMA to prove its efficacy in healing the sick?

The federal government named Logan in Queensland as its second site for its drug-testing trial of new unemployment recipients from 2018 on Wednesday, drawing the ire of the local mayor.

The Victorian government slammed the program when it was announced earlier this year and Premier Daniel Andrews says his stance has not changed. "I think it's much better to support people to get off drugs, I think it's much better to support people to rebuild their life providing all the supports and services that are needed rather than demonising people," he told reporters in Melbourne. "Rather than these pretty cheap approaches, it may be popular with some but I don't know it ultimately delivers the outcomes that various federal government ministers are bragging about."

The change in attitudes will be seen as a further step towards decriminalisation and follows claims by drug experts that police forces across Britain are quietly turning a blind eye to cannabis use in order to focus their attentions on more pressing priorities.

Those caught smoking or cultivating the drug on a small scale in Derbyshire, Dorset and Surrey, can expect to escape with little more than a caution, according to reports ... He said: “There are other police authorities that are doing similar things but they are not shouting about it. As police forces face increasing cuts they will have to make these decisions.​From the Article: Three more police forces signal that they will turn blind eye to cannabis usePublished by: Telegraph.co.ukOriginal Link :http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11767001/Three-more-police-forces-signal-that-they-will-turn-blind-eye-to-cannabis-use.htmlArtwork Fair Use:By Jason Bortz (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/1726195) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Police in the Philippines are performing door-to-door drug testing in [a poor neighbourhood home to the Philippines' largest landfill site], and adding people’s names to a list if they test positive for drug use – while the death toll of the country’s drug war slaughter continues to surge.

Groups of police officers are going from house to house in the Manila neighbourhood of Payatas ordering residents to urinate into cups. The urine is then immediately tested for prior use of methamphetamine or cannabis. If the test reveals drug use during the past seven days, the individual’s name will be added to a list of people who use drugs, according to ABS-CBN News. Payatas is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Manila, and is home to the largest open landfill site in the Philippines - where many local residents scavenge for recyclable materials as their only option for income. The approach, which government officials have called a “massive drug clearing operation”, is legally dubious. Under the law, mandatory drug tests can only be imposed upon certain people – such as applicants for driving licenses and employees of public office. If the police ask a random person to urinate in a cup for drug testing, that person is not legally obliged to do so; however, the fear or pressure that person may experience may lead them to consent to the test. Father Michael Sandaga, a local parish priest in Payatas, described the operation as “tantamount to coercion because people are subjected to drug testing against their will”.

"It's a great recognition of the fact that we don't need to further criminalize and turn people into felons over substance abuse, mental health addiction -- problems like that," public defender Aaron Jeffers said Wednesday. "I think the hope is that this will open up the opportunity to provide a lot of resources, in terms of treatment instead of building more prisons," public defender Karla Nash said.

"Our findings set the stage for heterologous production of [psilocybin] in a controlled place for pharmaceutical purposes, using engineered microbial hosts, should the re-discovered pharmaceutical value lead to increased demands," the researchers write in their report.

After four decades of virtually ignoring the science of psychedelics, researchers tentatively returned to investigating how substances such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin behaved in the brain. Since then researchers have found evidence that psychedelics can reduce the clinical symptoms of mood and affective disorders, addiction, and even help painful conditions such as cluster headaches. More recently, it's been found that small doses of psilocybin can be used in conjunction with therapy to help 'reset' brains as they're going through counselling.

Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of the Philippine capital of Manila to denounce President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs...

Amid public pressure, Duterte said on Monday there could have been abuses in his anti-drug war policy. "There is a possibility that in some of police incidents there could be abuses. I admit that," Duterte told reporters in Manila. "These abusive police officers are destroying the credibility of the government." At least 4,000 people joined in the rally, adding that a separate protest was also held in another part of the city. Protesters are demanding an independent investigation into the summary executions and police operations that left thousands of people dead. They said the president should be held accountable for the deaths.​From the Article: Thousands demand end to killings in Duterte's drug warPublished by: AljazeeraOriginal Link :http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/thousands-demand-killings-duterte-drug-war-170821124440845.htmlArtwork Fair Use:By Zephyris at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Shashenka using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19372418

One of the most surprising findings is the simplicity of the process, says David Sherman, a medicinal chemist at the University of Michigan who wasn’t involved in the paper. In only five steps, the mushroom’s enzymes convert tryptophan, a widely occurring amino acid (a building block of protein) into psilocybin.

In a study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, Dirk Hoffmeister and colleagues sequenced and mapped the genes in the “magic” mushroom Psilocybe cubensis. Scientists have known for a while that these genes produce several enzymes that combine to create psilocybin, but nobody knew the sequence and order of this seemingly mystical process. Through a series of trial-and-error type tests, Hoffmeister and colleagues figured out the correct order. “There was some Wow! in the air” when the team finally figured it out,” says Hoffmeister, with the University of Jena in Germany ... The paper could pave the way for people without advanced knowledge to produce psilocybin on their own, using commercially available synthetic biology kits, Sherman says.

ECfES

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